Christoph,
I do see your point regarding lacking information in papers.
Truth to be told, most labelling research is from computational geometry
and they do often not care too much about actually labelling the maps,
weird as it sounds. And as a more math-based discipline, they have a
very low priority on providing workable parametrisation. Exceptions
exist of course, no disrespect whatsoever to all the brilliant geometers
out there on whose shoulders we stand!
Our paper in contrast includes all the information and parametrisation
you need to implement that wherever you want. And the tileset shows you
how the results will look like.
Maybe we should have waited till the paper is accepted before sharing.
Sorry for any confusion we caused.
Thanks for your interest and time.
Andreas
PS: Regarding government money on research
We all have limited contracts and are evaluated by journal paper output.
That is the reality of it. Our boss is a strong believer in "demo or
die", but the general structure works against that.
Am 14.07.2013 19:32, schrieb Christoph Hormann:
On Sunday 14 July 2013, Andreas Reimer wrote:
The whole point of algorithms research is to move beyond
implementation and do research, well on algorithms, instead of
software libraries. That Max has a very stable and functional
framework is uncommon for the scientific community.
And he built that framework mostly in his free time over the years to
better test his hypotheses & results.
I never said anything about the whole framework. I am well aware there
is much more to producing a map like the one you showed than just the
label placement code. But the point is that for your work to
contribute to scientific progress you need to make available everything
others need to reproduce your research results. If you can do this
just using pseudocode and verbal description that is fine. Since in
your blog you cite Eduard Imhof who is well known for his ability to
describe in minute detail his cartographic techniques i should probably
give you the benefit of the doubt but knowing the complexity of label
placement i do not expect this to be practical.
Of course there is a lot of stuff published in science journals,
especially wrt. algorithms that does not include the information
necessary to reproduce the results. This does not make it right though
and such publications usually make little contribution to the overall
scientific progress.
There are strong interests at stake that make wholesale software
development at Universities a risky endeavour or plainly forbidden.
You might disagree with that, but I hope you can at least acknowledge
there are competing interests here which neither of us can change at
the moment.
Of course there are competing interests but since the financiers of
public research in Europe these days do not usually require or even
explicitly support making available the results to the public this
competition is a little one-sided. You, the researchers working at
those institutions, are the only ones who can actually make a
difference here.
And we
hope we pushed the boundaries in what is feasible without any
proprietary software a little bit.
Just to clarify this - if the code is not available for others to use,
modify and redistribute it is proprietary software, even if all code
except your own is free.
Greetings,
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